The Amateur

A radical manifesto about doing what you love

Andy Merrifield offers a passionate tribute to the revolutionary spirit of the amateur—a figure who thinks outside the box, takes risks, dreams the impossible dream, seeks independence, and carves out a new world. Merrifield celebrates such square pegs as Charles Baudelaire, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Edward Said, Guy Debord, Hannah Arendt, and Jane Jacobs, each of whom shows us a path of unconventional wisdom and freedom.

The Amateur advocates urgently for the liberated life, one that creates the space to question authority.

“A satisfying celebration of the ‘great romantic dream … a society that breaks free of the vicious circle of undefined productivity.’”
—Publishers Weekly

“Rather than thinking of amateurs as dabblers, weekend gardeners, busying themselves with unimportant tasks, Merrifield defends the creative and political potential of doing things we love for pleasure. Amateurs take risks, seek independence, innovate by choosing a less obvious direction. By exploring the work of figures like Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, and Hannah Arendt, and their impact on his own professional life, Merrifield succeeds in highlighting the revolutionary spirit of the amateur.”
—The Idler

“Erudite and engagingly written … refreshing.”
—Financial Times

“Here amateurs (a word derived from the Latin ‘to love’) are non-alienated citizens; enthusiasts, who counter the mechanical expertise and technical formalism of modern society; passionate obsessives standing up for values that need defending. Merrifield, an urban theorist who writes with a brio and wit often missing in professional academics, offers an idiosyncratic canon (Dostoevsky, Jane Jacobs, Edward Said) in which he holds up amateurs as outside-the-box thinkers, inter- and post-disciplinary radicals. It’s a stirring book whose critique of contemporary work culture will be instantly recognisable. It also doubles as a moving memoir of a working-class intellectual.”
—Sukdev Sandhu, Observer

“A celebration of brilliant quirks, hobbyists both talented and not, and passionate activists, a full-frontal assault on professionalism, and a call to cherish our amateur pursuits … Delightful to read, The Amateur is also a timely salvo.”
—Miya Tokumitsu, Frieze

“This elegant polemic is a persuasive manifesto for amateurism.”
—Daily Mail

“Provides a much needed take-down of the social legitimacy and sense of virtue with which the professional class has been endowed. It’s a critique of professionalism—and an urgently needed one.”
—PopMatters

Andy Merrifield is the author of nine books. His many articles, essays and reviews have appeared in the Nation, Harper’s, Adbusters, New Left Review, Dissent, the Brooklyn Rail, and Radical Philosophy. He is a prolific writer about urbanism and social theory, with titles credited to him including The New Urban Question and Magical Marxism. He has also published three intellectual biographies, of Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord and John Berger, as well as a popular travelogue, The Wisdom of Donkeys.